Yuri Takhteyev Email & Phone Number

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Toronto, On, Ca

Leveraging my research at U of T and experience building a talent destination, I developed an idea for a product to help remote workers build stronger relationships at work through large scale interactive virtual events. After finding a co-founder who took on the business aspects of the venture, my focus shifted to building and leading the development team, including recruiting, key architectural decisions, as well as a lot of hands-on development work (React, Rx-JS, Node, AWS CDK). Under my leadership a small engineering team working with a small budget (we raised $1M) built a scalable and low-maintenance product with a market leading feature set. The product was used by leading companies such as BCG, Deloitte and TED, helping tens of thousands of people build friendships at work. The company was acquired by Roblox in July 2022.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

In my time at Wealthsimple I worked on expanding the Engineering team, growing it from 95 to 120 people, adding a number of senior technical leaders, including two engineering directors and two staff engineers. Working with other leaders, I helped Wealthsimple move to a lighter-weight continuous planning process and a verticalized R&D model, with teams having end-to-end autonomy to solve business problems. Under my leadership the company made significant improvements in disaster recovery and security posture. At the outset of COVID-19, I headed the effort to quickly transition Wealthsimple to working remotely (including the brokerage functions), leveraging our earlier disaster recovery preparations. I then led the team through scaling challenges to support rapid growth of trading volumes, while also developing plans for medium- and long-term scaling of legacy systems.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

I joined Rangle.io when it had two people (one joined the day before me), taking responsibility for technology and later other aspects of project delivery. I worked to build Rangle’s 150+ person strong delivery team nearly from scratch, personally interviewing the overwhelming majority of the first 100 team members. I set technology direction, implemented best practices and led adoption of agile. I oversaw my team as it delivered hundreds of projects for clients such as Google, Uniqlo, TD, Pacific Life, Priceline, Aldo and many others. Under my leadership my team established itself as one of Toronto’s strongest in agile development process and a global reference in modern front end technology.In my last year at Rangle.io I focused on managing the technology team (130 people) and expanding Rangle’s area of technical expertise to incorporate devops, cloud, backend development, artificial intelligence and analytics.In addition to my core areas of responsibility (delivery and technology) I also played a key role in architecting and growing Rangle.io’s culture, helping it become a talent destination and grow from 3 to nearly 300 people.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

I joined University of Toronto for a 3 year position in the rank of an Assistant Professor after finishing my Ph.D. at Berkeley. During my time at the University I taught hundreds of students, which included courses on database design, information management, history of information technology, and open source software development. I also published a number of papers, including two papers on social networks that have collected over 500 citations each, and a book on globalization of software development with MIT Press (http://codingplaces.net/). I also obtained and administered competitive research funding (SSHRC).My academic CV is available upon request.

Berkeley, Ca, Us

During my time at Berkeley I was involved in a number of research projects on topics lying at the intersection of information technology and social science. My dissertation research project explored formation of global ties in software industry through an ethnography of software developers working in Brazil. Other research projects looked at early use of camera phones (in 2003!) and economics of open source software.

New York, Ny, Us

I joined AOL Time Warner through an acquisition of a speech technology startup Quack.com. I led a team that developed tools for building speech solutions on top of Quack’s platform. This included a tool for designing call flow dialogs, a suite of tools for managing production of recorded prompts, analysis tools for production applications, and others. After Quack was acquired by AOL, we focused primarily on delivering what became AolByPhone.

(This is the same job as AOL, since Quack.com was bought by AOL.)

As a member of CSLI's Computational Semantics Laboratory, I worked on two research projects that aimed to expand what could be done with conversational / natural language interfaces, i.e., where a person interacts with a computer just by speaking. (A lot like Siri, but in the 1990s.) The first project involved setting up a kiosk where library users could get information they need by speaking. The second one involved developing interfaces for a “unmanned aerial vehicle” (a 1990s equivalent of a drone).

Master Of Science - Ms, Computer Science

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Symbolic Systems

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Information Management And Systems